1. I could be the teensiest bit biased here, but this is my favorite of the school reopening plans I have read about so far. I particularly appreciate the every-four-weeks opportunity for families to switch between in-person and online learning. And I use that term “online learning” deliberately here (rather than the squishier “remote learning”), because that is definitely what it is. (ThisWeek News, 8/13/20) Wellington doesn’t start its school year until September 8, but Emerson Academy in Dayton started the year this past Wednesday. The description we have here—nicely detailed—sounds to me like live, synchronous, proper “online learning” with lots of energy, backstops, and innovation in evidence. As befits the charter school ethos, the early-starters of Emerson feel like pioneers. “…I told my teachers, let’s just get it going, and we can help write the playbook for other schools,” said Principal Landon Brown. He added that educators must accept that the online start of the year is not going to be perfect. They just have to jump in, start figuring it out and move students forward. Sounds just right to me. (Dayton Daily News, 8/13/20)
    
2. The one thing we didn’t hear about in the private school story above was student transportation. I know for a fact that kids come to Wellington from all over central Ohio, transported by school buses with many different districts’ names emblazoned on them. The question of how—and more importantly, whether—remote-learning districts will be firing up the old yellow buses this fall to deliver resident students to their in-person private or charter schools seems to be a hot button issue. We’ve already seen the tension playing out writ small in Dayton, but you know when the state gets involved—both ODE and the legislature—it’s gonna get writ large quickly. Stay tuned. (Columbus Dispatch, 8/14/20)
    
3. You know, I don’t perhaps give enough props to hardworking local journalists around Ohio. Not only do they do yeoman’s work in getting stories and getting them to print every day (not to mention the fact that without them these clips would suck even more than they sometimes do), but they often also have the inside track to stories that perhaps wouldn’t always get out. The relationships journalists develop with their local sources are vital to this latter point. Reporters and sources are both integral in getting important stories out to members of the public who need to know. Symbiotic, you might say. To those journalists, I say I’m sorry for not being more grateful on the regular. Why am I bringing this all up just now? No reason, really. Let’s finish up. We learned this week thanks to one of those intrepid local journalists that the leaders of Lorain City Schools have interpreted ODE’s pandemic-related graduation requirement flexibility to include the retroactive awarding of diplomas to former district students as far back as the Class of 1994. We are told that district officials are pro-actively contacting some of those individuals in order to issue them retroactive diplomas. Curriculum and assessment coordinator Sarah Eagan-Reeves told the MJ, “I'm glad that the state allowed us the ability to do this, because it really allows people to get on with their lives.” This, frankly, smells to me. I don’t know a lot about politics and legislation, but it seems like a pretty broad interpretation of that pandemic-related flexibility. If anything, they should have started with students who missed out on graduation due to the 1918 pandemic. That would be more defensible in my humble opinion. But hey, what do I know? All I can say for sure is that I am super happy for local journalists eager to get their stories out and their equally-dedicated local sources. (Morning Journal, 8/12/20) Meanwhile, and probably just coincidentally, we learned from the same journalist and sources that Lorain City Schools is anticipating a sizeable learning gap for its returning students this year. It’s a bit confusing as to why officials are certain that gap will occur—regional and national data and Covid infection rates are cited—and so is the discussion of what the district is doing to prepare for and address it. But at least the district has flexibility on the far end of it all. Don’t they? (Morning Journal, 8/13/20)

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In the Center for Reinventing Public Education’s latest report, I was shocked to read that, “less than a third of reviewed district reopening plans reference intervention strategies to help targeted students make up learning they may have lost during spring or summer.”

Perhaps K–12 leaders’ lack of attention to remediating learning losses is due to a lack of understanding of how much is at stake, not just for millions of children, but also for the economy and future levels of social and political conflict in America.

Before Covid-19 arrived, U.S. companies were experiencing a rapidly worsening talent shortage. As CNBC reported, “a recent survey from the Manpower Group, a job placement firm, found that nearly seven in ten employers reported talent shortages in 2019, the worst level ever and a jump of 17 percentage points from just a year ago. It’s also more than three times higher than a decade ago.”

At the micro level, this talent shortage leads to three negative consequences.

First, companies that can attract scarce talent have been much faster to adopt new technologies, which has enabled them to grow faster than their peers. An analysis by McKinsey and Company found that, “the top 10 percent of companies now capture 80 percent of positive economic profit.... [Moreover], after adjusting for inflation, today’s superstar companies have 1.6 times more economic profit, on average, than the superstar companies of twenty years ago,”

Second, these companies’ superior profitability enables them to offer higher pay than competitors to attract more and more scarce talent, which strengthens their competitive advantage while also worsening income inequality.

Finally, due to a growing number of companies’ inability to attract talent and compete more successfully, they have been barely holding on in recent years. The Covid-19 shock will very likely drive many of them out of business, as you can see from daily reports of the rising number of business bankruptcies.

Moving from the micro to the macro level, increasing the supply of talent is critical to improving America’s rate of productivity growth, which will likely have a decisive impact on our nation’s trajectory over the next decade.

Let me explain why.

To offset the pandemic’s economic shock, nations have borrowed an enormous amount of debt and added it to the near record amounts that were already outstanding. In the future, repaying this mountain of debt will require either prolonged austerity or much higher growth, which is far more preferable.

However, with an ageing population, declining birthrate, and constraints on immigration, faster economic growth can only occur if labor productivity sharply increases.

Some analysts believe that it is only a matter of time before increasing investments in automation and artificial intelligence technologies lead to this increase. Others aren’t so sure.

In “The Productivity J-Curve,” Erik Brynjolfsson, Daniel Rock, and Chad Syverson note that realizing higher productivity benefits from new technology also requires investment in intangibles, like new processes and more highly skilled employees.

But in “Digital Abundance and Scarce Genius,” Seth G. Benzell and Erik Brynjolfsson find that the shortage of talented employees is the most important constraint on the faster deployment and diffusion of advanced technologies across the economy and realization of hoped for productivity gains.

Unfortunately, in “The Global Talent Crunch,” Korn Ferry concluded that, “the United States faces one of the most alarming talent crunches of any [of the twenty countries] in our study.”

In sum, failure to address America’s talent shortage will very likely lead to lower productivity and economic growth, more struggles to service unprecedented levels of private- and public-sector debt, further weakening of competition in many industries, worsening inequality, and intensification of our already high levels of social and political conflict.

Given what’s at stake, I am alternately mystified and horrified by the short shrift that many districts are apparently giving to the critical need to make up the learning losses that have been suffered by many of our nation’s 51 million K–12 students.

And I’m not alone.

McKinsey recently concluded that, by 2040, failure to recover Covid-19 learning losses could lead to a loss of 0.8–1.3 percent per year of U.S. GDP.

The majority of parents are also worried. According to Pew Research, across the United States, 64 percent are concerned about their children falling behind in school because of the coronavirus outbreak. This rises to 76 percent among lower-income families.

Given these warnings, I wish I could be optimistic about what lies ahead in K–12. But I’m not.

As Philip Tetlock explained in his book Superforecasting (and I learned during four years on his Good Judgment Project team), the most accurate forecasters start with base rate data, and then regularly update them with new evidence.

When it comes to remediating learning losses, the base rate data are bleak. For example, NAEP and state testing results, along with previous research by ACT Inc., have shown that, before Covid-19 arrived, recovering from learning losses was already a nationwide challenge that few districts met.

To be sure, recent evidence shows that ideas for remediating learning losses caused by the pandemic are out there, like wider use of acceleration and tutoring (e.g., “Acceleration Not Remediation: Lessons from the Field,” by Simaran Bakshi and David Steiner and “The Impressive Effects of Tutoring on PreK-12 Learning,” a new meta-analysis by Andre Nickow, Philip Oreopoulos, and Vincent Quan).

But when more than two-thirds of CRPE’s sample of district reopening plans don’t even mention strategies for remediating learning losses, widespread and effective implementation of these and other ideas seems very unlikely.

At this point, it is hard not to conclude that Covid-19 learning losses are likely to be permanent.

Dark days lie ahead.

If we’re honest with ourselves, we’ll admit that this crisis has thrown all of us for a loop. We humans aren’t built for something so unnerving, so unprecedented in our own lifetimes, so mysterious and hard to understand and out of control. We might view our own brains as perfectly rational, but despite our best efforts, we’re going to grasp for the familiar in times like this, including familiar ways of thinking.

For those of us who spend our professional lives in the world of K–12 education policy, that means reaching for familiar and comfortable, if perhaps shopworn, explanations for the insane moment we’re living through, as 35,000 private schools, 13,000 school districts, and 7,000 charter schools struggle separately to make decisions about whether to open for in-person education, and if so, how. All this amid an ugly public debate about how to balance the health and safety needs of kids, families, and educators with the educational mission of our schools. So it is that we hear these common refrains:

• The teachers unions are using the crisis to squeeze more money out of a desperate public!
• President Trump and Betsy DeVos are using the crisis to attack public schools and promote their privatization agenda!
• Democratic governors are putting the needs of adults and special interests over the needs of kids, who belong in school!
• Republican governors are trying to divert attention from their failure to control the virus, while putting teachers in harm’s way!

My priors, meanwhile, push me toward seeing things through the prism of power politics. I came to education reform as a political science major way back when, impressed with the Chubb and Moe explanation of why so many schools serving poor kids were mediocre or worse. (Remember? It’s because teachers and administrators have all the power and poor parents have none. Rich parents, meanwhile, have the most power of all. So of course schools in affluent suburbs are opening for in-person instruction, while those in cities stay shuttered.)

There’s a bit of truth in all of these analyses and explanations. But they fail to capture the full truth because they rely on old heuristics to address a totally new situation.

Most critically, what should we make of the fact that the (low-income) parents of the kids who most need to be in school—academically, socially, emotionally—are overwhelmingly scared to send them there? If this debate comes down to a power play pitting teachers against families and employees against clients, how to explain the fact that many of the clients are just as opposed to in-person school as the employees are?

This, to me, is the crucial fact of the entire reopening debate: Low-income parents and parents of color are in solidarity with most teachers in not wanting their children to return to school buildings until the pandemic has passed. Sixty-four percent of Black parents want remote learning, versus just 32 percent of White parents. According to Education Week:

The data also show that a majority of families who make less than $50,000 a year wanted schools to avoid in-person instruction entirely for the 2020–21 school year. By contrast, only 27 percent of families who make more than $150,000 a year wanted remote-only schooling. While counterintuitive for the families who often have the least job flexibility and the greatest need to get back to work quickly, the finding is in line with other recent surveys.

What accounts for this race and class disparity in parental preferences? The obvious explanation is that low-income communities and communities of color have been much harder hit by the virus than their more advantaged peers. Poor parents of color are much likelier to know someone who has been seriously ill, or even died, from Covid-19, and they are responding with much more caution as a result.

That’s surely part of it. But I suspect there’s something else. I bet that many low-income and working-class parents don’t trust their kids’ schools to keep them safe. And here again they are not wrong. Their children have had the misfortune to attend schools that are (in too many cases) dysfunctional across the board. They can’t teach their pupils to read or write. They can’t keep their classrooms safe and orderly. Why would they succeed in helping students maintain social distance, or respond to an outbreak with care and competence?

Teachers, too. Many of them also have to toil in school buildings and districts that are dysfunctional, that struggle to provide them with basic tools of the trade, that select terrible textbooks, that tie their hands when it comes to disciplining students, that spend scarce dollars on dubious professional development programs or the latest technology instead of boosting their pay, that embrace the Peter Principle as the cornerstone of their principal pipelines. If they cannot trust their district bureaucracies to keep them safe, enforce mask mandates, provide personal protective equipment, send sick kids home, and all the rest, can we really blame them?

Yes, there are some high-trust school districts out there, and I would posit that they are much more likely to open in person or in hybrid fashion, as long as the local rate of infection allows it. Same goes for high-quality charter schools—though probably not low-quality charter schools. If we believe that it’s just about power—do parents get what they want, including in person instruction if they want it?—then we should expect most charters to open (again as long as the health conditions allow it). After all, they need to keep their customers happy. But if it’s about trust, then even “empowered” charter-school parents will keep their kids home if they aren’t sure they’ll be safe at school. And those low-quality charter schools will also have a harder time getting their teachers to show up, even though they’re not unionized.

You go to war with the army you have—not the army you might wish you have. We face this crisis with the schools we have, not the schools we might wish to have. And in too many places, those schools have not built reservoirs of trust with their families or their staff. Now we live with the consequences.

The tremor that you felt last week was the dropping of a new Emily Hanford radio documentary, “What the Words Say: Many kids struggle with reading—and children of color are far less likely to get the help they need.” Since she started reporting on reading several years ago, Hanford has kept up the pressure on the scourge of educational malpractice that is America’s approach to reading instruction. Her formula is simple but effective: gut-wrenching stories interwoven with science, data, and a just-the-facts-ma’am ethos.

Clocking in at just under fifty-three minutes, Hanford’s latest entry hones in on how early reading problems are particularly acute with Black, Hispanic, and Native American students. Unlike White and Asian children who often have more opportunities to develop E.D. Hirsch’s concept of cultural literacy at home, low-income children of color often attend schools that fall short in building content knowledge, vocabulary, and reading comprehension, a failure from which they rarely fully recover.

Hanford’s first documentary on reading, now three years old, explored how poorly kids with dyslexia are being served. Her next two tackled the broader problem of reading instruction failure, stemming from misbegotten strategies and schools’ refusal to teach decoding. This time, Hanford delves deep into the importance of building knowledge and vocabulary so kids can understand the words they decode—lest they start the path toward dropping out of school and being consigned to the criminal justice system.

Indeed, in a windowless cinderblock room at a juvenile detention facility in Houston, Hanford sat in on a cringeworthy reading lesson with a fifteen-year-old that had been failed by his teachers and his schools:

He was trying to read a story about a man taking a bus ride. Occasionally, he’d successfully sound out and there’d be a flash of recognition. “Woman!” he exclaimed after slowly decoding the word. But it was clear from earlier in the lesson that Mateo didn’t know the meaning of a lot of the words he was trying to say: fleet, sneer, gloat. If someone had read the story out loud to him, he wouldn’t have understood it all.

Listening to Mateo struggle and labor through the words was as painful as it was heartbreaking, to think what might have been had he been explicitly taught how to decode words earlier in his life. Rather than entering the downward spiral that locked him into purgatory as a beginning reader into his teens, he would have been lifted up by the virtuous cycle created when young children, fluent in decoding, recognize words they haven’t seen but have heard many times. 

My daughter, who will be entering kindergarten in a couple of weeks, is a prime example of the Matthew Effect described by reading researchers and underscored by Hanford in her piece. Before ever setting foot inside her new school, she’s already reading at a fourth-grade level, and is particularly voracious when it comes to anything written by Mo Willems, Dav Pilkey, or Aaron Blabey. I’ve been paying close attention to her language comprehension by chatting with her on all sorts of topics and exposing her to a bounty of experiences outside of school to build her background knowledge, which is the whole ballgame when it comes to being literate.

Of course, the effort I’ve invested in my daughter’s reading stems from an abiding love, but it also comes after years spent in schools and recognizing that I needed to obtain an insurance policy against the risk of her becoming a struggling reader. As Hanford soberly observes, America’s schools reflexively believe one of two things when a child stumbles. One, there must be a problem at home (he wasn’t read to enough), or two, there must be a problem with the child (he has a learning disability). It seldom occurs to schools to hold up the mirror and admit they never taught the child how to read.

Honesty and responsibility on the part of schools would have made all the difference for Sonya Thomas, a Nashville mother profiled by Hanford, whose pleas to address the reading problems of her son, C.J., went unanswered until he reached the seventh grade, when she learned that he was only reading at a second-grade level. Left to slip through the cracks, the overdue revelation brought Thomas to tears, as it surely does for millions of parents like her who place their faith in schools to ensure their children master the most basic and most fundamental academic skill. Infuriated, Thomas is now a woman on a mission to help families avoid the grotesque dereliction of duty on the part of those charged with the education and care of C.J., Mateo, and countless children now staring down the barrel of a needlessly difficult life as an adult.

In the wake of national unrest and a renewed demand for racial justice, and on the eve of a back-to-school season unlike any in memory, Hanford’s newest offering is timely because it travels upstream to remind us why these deep-seated inequalities among U.S. children continue to persist. On national reading tests, more than 80 percent of Black and Native American students score below proficient, and 77 percent of Hispanic students remain mired under that same threshold. Making matters worse, many parents don’t know how far behind their kids are until it’s too late.

As inexcusable as this state of affairs may be, it’s unclear how things are supposed to improve in the time of Covid-19. If Hanford makes one thing palpable through her reporting, it’s that schools have a hard enough of a time teaching children how to read when the lessons are conducted in-person, let alone through the keyhole of Zoom. With many schools planning to remain physically shuttered through at least the first semester, if not longer, they would do well to leverage the wealth of resources available to bridge the gap. If they don’t, the Matthew Effect on reading comprehension will take hold and never let go.

The private schools in Montgomery County, Maryland, where I live, are breathing a sigh of relief that, after much sturm und drang this past week, they’re back in charge of their own decisions about whether and how to re-open. This comes after the county ordered them to stay closed, then the governor moved to countermand the county’s authority to do so, then the county balked at carrying out the governor’s order, whereupon confusion reigned, and urgent late-in-the-game litigation seemed all but certain. On Friday, the county backed down. Whew!

Montgomery County contains about 130 private schools, which range from high-priced, elite, independent schools with sprawling campuses (one of them attended by fourteen-year-old Barron Trump) to low-cost, semi-urban, parochial schools serving poor and working-class kids, many of them Black, Brown, or immigrants. For comparison, Montgomery County Public Schools (MCPS), one of the country’s largest districts, operates more than 200 schools.

When county health officer Travis Gayles issued his August 1 order forbidding them to open, the school the president’s son attends in upscale Potomac, according to the Washington Post, “had published in-depth reopening guidelines calling for constant mask-wearing, lunch eaten outdoors, staggered dismissal from classes, and ‘scheduled hand washing times.’” A Catholic K–8 school in middle-class Kemp Mill reportedly had made “exhaustive precautions to ensure the safety of its roughly 300 students, preparing for health screenings and spacing out desks. The school, which charges roughly $8,400 per student, had offered families a choice between three models...100 percent in-person learning, three days of in-person learning each week and fully virtual learning.” These and kindred schools around the county were doing what private schools have long done: charting their own courses, making their own decisions, maybe following their own karma, gauging their environments, examining the health data, and listening to their clients. Whether to open, how to open, and what choices to offer families all were in their own purview, and there was no reason to expect school A, school B, or school C to do it the same way, even if MCPS had to standardize its own plan.

Dr. Gayles’s original directive said no private schools in Montgomery County could open physically until at least October 1. Consternation followed, with innumerable angry and disappointed parents and school people objecting to this overturning of their own careful plans for the new year, as well as the unprecedented usurpation of the schools’ autonomy. Some schools said they would comply, while others appealed to Governor Larry Hogan. Attorneys were hired and lawsuits readied. Then Hogan responded on August 3 with an amended executive order denying the state’s local governments, all of which are counties except for Baltimore City, the authority to order schools closed, though they remained free to make their own rules for just about everything else.

This was a peculiar use of executive action, and it’s not clear what statutory or constitutional authority Hogan was relying on to create this carve-out for schools. Nor is it the first time he’s used executive orders to intrude in key decisions about school openings and closings—although, perversely, in the previous instance that I know best, he did so to remove local discretion.

Gayles initially stuck to his guns, insisting that he was right and Hogan wrong, and he was backed by County Executive Marc Elrich. Confusion reigned until, probably to avoid litigation, the county officials backed down. Gayles didn’t change his view, however, stating in the latest Health Department directive that “I continue to strongly believe that…it is neither safe nor in the interest of public health for any school to return for in-person learning this fall.”

All this fuss might just be the intergovernmental version of bull elephant seals fighting over their harems. But as with all school reopening decisions, politics and adult interests are also at play. Montgomery County’s current executive is a famously liberal Democrat who is close—to put it gently—to the big public-employee unions, most definitely including the county’s omnipresent teachers union, and he almost always does their bidding, no matter how fiscally irresponsible that often turns out to be. Even the famously liberal county council has occasionally had to reject (or trim) his over-generous pandering with tax dollars.

Larry Hogan, though no conservative, is a Republican, and on the handful of occasions when he’s pushed for some education reform or initiative, he’s nearly always been reversed by the powerful Maryland State Education Association and its allies, including a veto-proof Democratic majority in both houses of the general assembly.

I would wager my high school diploma that the Montgomery County teachers union, having achieved its wish to keep the public schools virtual this fall (after having thrown much sand into the district’s efforts at online learning during the spring), and in the heat of a vexed negotiation over its next contract, whispered into Elrich’s receptive ears that it would be unfair to allow the private schools to open for business and thereby show them up. And I’d wager my college degree that the peeved private school parents who protested the county’s move to Hogan’s office fed gubernatorial suspicions that this school-closing order was again the handiwork of the union, its catspaw in the County Executive’s office, and its fellow travelers at the state level.

Why should you, who live elsewhere, care about any of these goings-on in my backyard? Because what’s been happening here is a microcosm of a national phenomenon. When Chicago Public Schools announced a few days back that its vast system would be all-virtual this fall, it was responding to a threatened strike by the city’s teachers union if it attempted to do otherwise. The same thing happened in Los Angeles a few weeks earlier. In New York, Governor Cuomo has said that schools may reopen, and Mayor de Blasio wants them to open, but the state’s and city’s mighty teachers unions are far from convinced, and while strikes aren’t allowed in New York, there are all sorts of other ways the unions and their members can manage to keep schools closed. New Mexico’s Democratic governor has decreed that private schools in the Land of Enchantment must abide by rules for close-contact businesses. The Florida Teachers Association has gone to court to invalidate the governor’s school-reopening order. And the American Federation of Teachers has said it’s fine with “safety strikes” if local teachers don’t think enough has been done to safeguard their health.

“School-opening Extortion” the Wall Street Journal termed it in a scathing editorial. “Rather than work to open schools safely,” quoth the editorialists, “the unions are issuing ultimatums and threatening strikes until granted their ideological wish list.” That includes not opening public schools physically, paying teachers and other school personnel extra to work during the pandemic, and keeping charter and private schools closed, too, lest the competition look more appealing to parents, politicians, and possibly teachers themselves. This is happening most conspicuously in blue states far beyond Maryland. Reports the Journal: 

New Jersey Gov. Phil Murphy has said that if public schools are remote-only, private schools must be too. In Milwaukee, private schools planning to reopen were blindsided by a state order that no schools can do so until the city meets certain benchmarks. In California, Gov. Gavin Newsom has laid out new guidelines that will prevent private and public schools from reopening until the state declares they can.

Never to waste a crisis—whether that maxim is properly attributed to Rahm Emmanuel, Winston Churchill, Saul Alinsky or M.F. Weiner—is a lesson that America’s teacher unions have internalized, and the Covid-19 pandemic has created for them a remarkable opportunity to throw their weight around in pursuit of a multi-part agenda: more money, less work, less competition, less testing, less accountability, and while they’re at it, help elect candidates in November (national, state, and local) who will adhere to that agenda long after the hoped-for vaccine is in widespread use. The draft Democratic platform, for example, would clamp down on charter schools and end “high-stakes testing.”

Sure, school teachers, like everyone else considering going back to work, have legitimate health concerns. Almost one in five of them are fifty-five or older, and a number of others have underlying conditions. Maybe a quarter to a third of them have cause for heightened concern about the potential consequences of acquiring the coronavirus. So do plenty of other school employees—bus drivers, school secretaries, custodians, cafeteria workers and more. Understood. That’s why competent schools and school systems that are reopening are taking extra precautions not only with their physical set-up, but also with their staffing plans. So, of course, is every conscientious entity that is asking its employees to return to the workplace. These decisions aren’t easy, and in many places, they’re still very much in flux.

Teachers’ legitimate interest in risk-mitigation in the workplace does not, however, extend to shutting down other people’s schools, slapping new constraints onto private and charter schools, downplaying the learning losses faced by their own pupils, squelching school choice, and doing away with results-based accountability. Not in Chicago, not in Los Angeles, not in Albuquerque, not in my backyard—and not in yours.

1. Fordham’s Chad Aldis is quoted in this coverage of a new report aimed at providing a roadmap for Ohio to increase the percentage of adults who have completed a postsecondary certificate, credential, or degree. “Especially exciting,” said Chad, “are the plan's efforts to expand opportunities for high school students to engage in work-based learning, industry certification, and advanced coursework.” Excellent stuff indeed. Here’s hoping the effort, dubbed Complete to Compete, goes full speed ahead. (Gongwer Ohio, 8/11/20)
    
2. Franklinton Prep High School, a dropout recovery charter school, was the first to open for full in-person classes here in central Ohio. They did so on Monday. The vote of families was 60/40 in favor of in-person schooling, and the superintendent says his school was “uniquely positioned to handle health restrictions”, so it appears that no online option was offered for the start of school. (I think that’s how it turned out—the piece is a little equivocal on that point.) There is no discussion of whether they ended up losing students if this indeed was the only option, but the supe does note that they are prepared to go back to the spring’s online-only option “in case the need arises”. (NBC4, Columbus, 8/10/20) It’s a charter elementary—North Dayton School of Discovery—that is first to open for the year in the Miami Valley. That also happened Monday. The school opted for a fully online model to start, that decision made in late July. While the rona is a factor, the school’s principal also cited Dayton City Schools’ horrible proposed transportation plan for charter schools as the main motivator of the decision. I might also suggest that the school’s excellent-sounding online model—each student receiving a Chromebook or tablet with teachers hosting live morning meetings and live virtual instruction with small groups, in addition to other educational videos—helped smooth the decision-making process. (Dayton Daily News, 8/10/20)
    
3. Breakthrough Schools in Cleveland do not start their school year until September 8, which is good because they are still working out certain details of their fully-remote reopening plan. (That plan is on their website – sounds like live virtual teaching all day every day along with “innovative extracurriculars” – you should check it out.) To wit: how to assist families whose students will not have adult supervision at home during the day this fall. Their plan, not yet finalized, will involve network-hired and trained chaperones at certain sites convenient to families around the city. (News 5, Cleveland, 8/10/20) There is no mention of churches in the foregoing clip, but they feature prominently in this one on the same topic. Just as with our Columbus story on Monday. The piece is long and digresses a lot into national political hot buttons (yuck), straying from the main point of safe spaces for Cleveland kids who will lack adult supervision academic motivators at home this fall. The key differences between this Cleveland story and the Columbus one is that the effort seems to be at a far-less-advanced stage in NEO and that the Cleveland school district decided not to comment. This could mean a lot of different things, but I have my own favorite among the possibilities. I’ll give you a clue: it rhymes with “honey”. Specifically, who has already been given a portion of “honey” and who is still waiting for some “honey”. (IdeaStream, Cleveland, 8/12/20)
    
4. In non-rona charter school news, students at the Utica Shale Academy will be sharing in a $200,000 state grant to help them gain knowledge and credentials in six so-called “Industry 4.0 building blocks”. I think this is good stuff, although your tolerance for jargony jargon like “informactionable data” may determine whether you think so or not. Anyway: congrats to the Fighting Frackers of USA! (WTOV-TV, Steubenville, 8/11/20)
    
5. Back to the back-to-school discussion: yesterday’s episode of the long-running soap opera Stories from the Crypt (hasn’t that misery-fest been cancelled yet?) included some statewide data on school reopening plans. Governor DeWine tells us that, as of now, more than 500,000 Ohio public school students (38 percent of the total) will return to the classroom fully in-person, while around 398,000 (25.6 percent) will have classes fully remotely, and 380,000 students (24.5 percent) will be operating under a hybrid model featuring both in-person and remote learning. Tune in next time when you’ll hear the governor say…. (Columbus Dispatch, 8/11/20) Lakewood City Schools is one of those districts whose students will be going back to school fully remotely, starting September 8. High school intervention specialist Corey Streets had to get creative in setting up his remote teaching station at his home, since the impending arrival of a new baby will kick him out of the spare room he used last spring. Thus, he has kitted out and unveiled “Mr. Streets’ Center for Remote Shed-ucation”. Yeah, it’s an actual shed, but somehow I love it. Although I’ll love it more when the Keurig is up and running. (Cleveland.com, 8/12/20)

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Research on education during the coronavirus pandemic has been robust. Much of it is table setting for longer-term analysis on virtual curricula, teaching effectiveness, and student achievement. But there is also important ephemera being studied that will form a more immediate image of a difficult and chaotic time. A recent report from the National Center for Research on Education Access and Choice (REACH) at Tulane University will form part of that image.

For this study, researchers combed the websites of a representative sample of 3,511traditional public schools (TPS), charter schools, and private schools nationwide looking to see how and how quickly each type of school responded to pandemic-mitigation shutdowns between early March and early June of this year. Their goal was to describe the extent to which schools provided personalized and engaging instruction and a wide range of services in the immediate aftermath of closure, ranking each area to calculate the breadth and depth of response. Thus they retrieved information on the details of instructional activities provided; types of activities presented outside of class; attendance, grading, and progress monitoring; breadth of service (meal provision, counseling services, and the like); and supports provided for students with special needs, English language learners, and students without internet access or compatible devices. Researchers gave their ratings added weight for personalization and engagement if instructional activities were conducted live/synchronous via video-based communication and if student participation was required rather than optional. The highest score a school could achieve was 50 points. The highest score observed was 35.1, and the national average was a disappointing 9 points. The vast majority of schools in the study earned a downright dismal score between 0 and 5 points.

The findings indicate that, rather than a broad response, schools stuck to one or two basic areas, the most common of which was providing academic instruction. Facilitating internet access and providing compatible devices to students was also a high priority. However, the focus seems to have been on general education students, with less service provided to students with disabilities and English language learners. Only 37 percent of schools even referenced a plan for students with disabilities on their websites; and just 17 percent of schools mentioned English language learners. Progress monitoring, likewise, was absent from a majority of school and district websites.

Traditional public schools scored the highest marks in terms of providing services to disadvantaged students, while charter schools scored higher in terms of engagement outside of class and on progress monitoring. Private schools switched to remote learning a few days earlier than TPS or charters, on average, but did not outperform them by a statistically significant margin in any category. TPS eventually caught up with the early-pivot schools on most measures. Researchers found no observable differences between standalone charters and those operating under management organizations.

Midwestern states tended to have the most comprehensive responses to closure, while Southern states tended to have the least comprehensive. These differences hold true even after accounting for income, parent education, and other differences across states. Urban schools had somewhat more extensive responses than non-urban schools. The strongest predictor of how comprehensively schools responded was the education level of parents and other adults in the neighborhood around the schools. Neighborhood internet access was also a strong predictor of school responses. School leaders were unlikely to implement live classes if they knew their students could not access them. Likewise, schools in neighborhoods with greater internet access had likely been using online tools more prior to the crisis and were therefore better prepared to increase their use when needed. That said, 73 percent of school websites that included any Covid-19 plan mentioned at least one online tool that students were expected to use. Google Classroom was the most common, followed by Zoom and similar video conferencing services. Tutorial tools such as Khan Academy were commonly referenced, although no single tool was dominant. Class Dojo, which can be used to communicate with parents and reward children with points for good behavior was used by 9 percent of schools.

These transient details of the chaotic end to the 2019–2020 school year are important to document. Many schools and districts are already mounting the 2020–2021 school year treadmill with barely a breath in between. Huge quality and equity gaps in education existed before coronavirus closures, and these findings mainly spotlight portions of the pre-existing picture. The true panorama will not become clear until we see if the short-term trouble leads to long-term fixes.

SOURCE: Douglas N. Harris, et. al., “How America’s Schools Responded to the COVID Crisis,” National Center for Research on Education Access and Choice (July 2020).

As of spring 2019, sixteen states have enacted laws requiring schools to hold back students when they fail to read proficiently by the end of third grade. The goal of these “reading guarantees” (as Ohio puts it) is praiseworthy: to ensure that all children have the foundational reading skills needed to navigate more challenging material.

The effect of these policies on retained students is usually the focus of debate and scholarly research. What’s less acknowledged, however, is that these policies also encourage schools to center attention on literacy before retention can actually occur. The threat of retention is supposed to spur broader improvements among third graders, as well. But does it?

A new study from the Manhattan Institute examines if third grade students, whether retained or not, benefit from Florida and Arizona’s reading guarantee policies. Marcus Winters of Boston University—a longtime evaluator of the Florida program—and Paul Perrault of the (Florida- and Arizona-based) Helios Institute conducted the analysis. They employ a difference-in-difference statistical method that compares schools’ third grade state test score trajectories to those in other grades. The basic idea is that third graders might see a bump as the literacy policies were implemented, but students in fourth or fifth grade wouldn’t. The study looks at results from the first year of implementation in both states (Florida in 2002–03 and Arizona in 2013–14).

Winters and Perrault uncover positive impacts in both states. In Florida, third graders’ test scores increased by an estimated 2.7 and 3.3 scale-score points on state reading and math exams, respectively, compared to their counterparts in fourth and fifth grade. Similar results emerge from Arizona, with third graders enjoying an increase of 2.4 scale-score points in reading and 5.2 points in math. These results are statistically significant and the analysts characterize the magnitude of the test-score impacts as “medium.” The slightly larger impacts in math are somewhat surprising, but the authors don’t speculate on potential explanations. Unfortunately, for methodological reasons, the analysts are unable to track the impacts of the early literacy policies beyond one year of implementation. Last, in a supplemental analysis of scores from Hillsborough County (FL), the researchers find that students across the achievement spectrum—not just low achievers—benefitted from the state’s literacy initiative.

By including a retention component, states’ early literacy initiatives help to ensure that struggling readers receive necessary time and supports. Analyses of Florida’s retention policy find a short-term boost for retained students, though test-score effects seem to fade out over time. A study from Chicago likewise finds a short-term increase in achievement among third graders who were retained. It’s not a silver bullet—educational interventions rarely are—but studies indicate that a retention-based policy can give struggling young readers a leg up when compared to similar achieving peers who are promoted.

Yet early literacy policies also seek to improve student outcomes more broadly, even among those who aren’t actually retained. While retention receives most of the spotlight, let’s not neglect the potential for wider benefits when schools are encouraged to improve literacy instruction across-the-board. 

Source: Paul Perrault and Marcus A. Winters, Test-Based Promotion and Student Performance in Florida and Arizona, Manhattan Institute (2020).

Today, in what ended up being a somewhat anticlimactic announcement, Joe Biden tapped California Senator Kamala Harris to be his running mate. Back in May, I examined Harris’s views on education, along with other top prospects, and here’s what I had to say about hers:

Sure, California is dependably blue regardless of who’s in the race, but some argue that Harris would bring much needed enthusiasm to the campaign. On education, she was first out of the gate last year with a proposal to increase teacher pay at a cost of $300 billion over ten years, though it’s unclear how anything like that would be remotely possible now with the looming economic shortfalls. Harris is also remembered for launching a pointed attack at Biden on school busing and desegregation, but she ended up backpedaling when pressed on her own views. All told, what she’s said on education hews tightly to the union playbook.

To be fair, the selection of Harris—the first black woman and the first person of Indian descent to be nominated for national office by a major party—is in some ways a milestone to be celebrated. By choosing her as his political partner, Biden has made her the face of the future of the Democratic Party. Unfortunately, when it comes to education, there’s little to get excited about. And if Harris becomes Commander in Chief in four or eight years, there will be plenty of reason to worry should she apply her typically vigorous campaign style to dismantling the education reforms started in the early aughts.

A new school year typically brings a fresh outlook and new hope. But over the last few weeks, in response to recommendations from local health officials and worrisome data trends, dozens of school districts across Ohio have announced their plans to begin the 2020–21 school year completely online. Even if they understand the rationale, lots of parents and students aren’t looking forward to starting the year online. And in the case of remote reopenings, persistent problems are looming.

At a baseline, saying distance learning “didn’t work” this spring is an understatement. A large majority of parents and teachers reported that students learned considerably less than they would have under normal circumstances. A student survey conducted by the national nonprofit YouthTruth found that only 39 percent of students reported that they “learned a lot almost every day.” A May survey released by ParentsTogether Action found that parents from low-income homes were twice as likely as their more affluent peers to say that remote learning was going poorly or very poorly. The struggles of students with special needs were also widely reported.

No one knows whether schools have plans to address these issues going forward. Some educators likely spent the bulk of their summer months planning for in-person reopenings, not another semester of online learning. And although families might feel like distance learning is familiar by now, it doesn’t make juggling professional and educational responsibilities any easier. Unfortunately, remote learning isn’t going to be easier either. In fact, it might even be more difficult.

Why? For starters, what worked—or at least sufficed—this spring won’t work this fall. Education Week reported in May that teachers were spending less time on instruction overall, less time on introducing new material, and more time on review. Given the timing of the spring closures, which covered the final quarter of the school year just before state testing season, it’s reasonable to assume that many schools would have been reviewing anyway. But that won’t fly this fall. Teachers can and should review previous material when necessary. But unlike last spring, students will need to be introduced to—and master—new, grade-level content or risk falling even further behind.

Providing such rigorous instruction will also be difficult. The struggles of navigating digital platforms haven’t diminished. In April, a principal at a high school in northern Kentucky told the Cincinnati Enquirer that one of the difficulties at the high school level is “getting students enough real-time support to do the work. When you think about subjects like advanced mathematics, this often requires modeling, practice with real-time feedback, question/answer, and potentially after-school tutoring.” Now these struggles will be compounded by spring learning losses. For teachers, that means starker achievement gaps and a much broader range of student academic needs. Differentiation has always been notoriously difficult. The pandemic will make it worse.

There’s also the relationship aspect to teaching and learning. Anyone who’s stood at the front of a classroom of children can attest to just how important relationships are when it comes to student growth. This spring, teachers had the benefit of already-established relationships with students and families. This fall, they won’t have that luxury. They’ll have to start from scratch, and they’ll have to build relationships over digital platforms.

Meanwhile, students are facing a laundry list of social-emotional struggles: sick loved ones, family financial troubles, loneliness and isolation, missed milestones, increased depression and anxiety, and broader societal unrest. A recent piece from The 74 put it this way: “In many ways, the pandemic has been a universally shared form of trauma among young people, and it is likely to increase the mental health challenges students will experience.”

In short, remote learning is going to be a lot harder this fall than it was this spring. That doesn’t mean schools are wrong to open fully remote. Reopening decisions are complicated, and local leaders are trying their best to keep everyone healthy and safe. But it’s important to be realistic about how difficult the next few weeks will be for remote-only schools. Identifying potential issues and addressing them consistently and effectively is vital. Otherwise, students will pay the price.